There are many types of food serving trays that have been designed for individual use by a seated person. Whenever someone is eating a snack or a full meal away from the conventional dining table, it is generally preferred to utilize an individual serving tray in order to make it possible to hold and partake of a number of food and beverage items. The need for such individual serving trays arises more frequently today with the more informal living styles and the tendency to eat while watching television in a family room or recreation room. In the absence of large formal dining rooms, dinners are often served buffet style with individual serving trays or tables being provided for the food and beverages while they are being consumed. Such individual food and beverage serving trays are also used at picnics, beach parties, camp-outs and any other outdoor excursion where food and beverages might be consumed.
The most commonly used of these serving trays consists of little more than a small flat tray with a shallow rim around the periphery. The tray must be balanced in the lap with a main requirement that it be maintained level so that the beverage container will not slide to the edge of the tray and spill as it strikes the rim. Accordingly major problems with most prior serving trays are the failure to provide means to stabilize the tray on the users lap and the absence of means to hold the food and beverage items in place on the tray. While there are some serving trays that have compartments to separate various foods and have shallow depressions for coffee cups, for instance, there seem to be no serving trays that solve the problems of maintaining the serving tray securely positioned in the lap and also maintain the food and beverage items positioned against sliding on the tray.
There are many examples in the prior art of individual trays used in serving food and beverage to consumers at buffet meals, cocktail parties and the like. These trays are intended to support food or beverage items or both while at the same time allowing the user to have one or both hands free to handle the particular item being consumed. Many of these are lap trays which are placed on the legs or lap of a seated person leaving both hands free to consume the contents of the tray. Examples of United States patents showing such lap trays are Harris et al U.S. Pat. No. Des. 308,450, Morrow et al U.S. Pat. No. Des. 308,773, Ali U.S. Pat. No. Des. 314,678, Grossman et al U.S. Pat. No. Des. 326,798, Mowry et al U.S. Pat. No. Des. 326,962, Samuelson U.S. Pat. No. 1,885,483, Olson U.S. Pat. No. 2,647,678 and Miller et al U.S. Pat. No. 5,425,455. None of these patents disclose lap trays that solve the problems discussed above with respect to retaining the tray on the lap.
In any discussion of individual food serving trays, consideration should be given to special circumstances that may place further restrictions on the type of serving tray that would be usable. In this day of well designed and constructed roads and automobiles, it is very common for drivers and passengers in such automobiles to be consuming food and drink while the automobile is being driven. However, the distraction of the driver's attention from driving during the actual consumption of food and drink may present risks to the safety of the automobile and its passengers. The risk may also be present during periods in which the driver is juggling the items of food or beverage while at the same time guiding the vehicle. It has been accepted that optimum control of a motor vehicle is achieved when the driver has both hands gripping the steering wheel. Accordingly, it is desirable to minimize the periods of time that the driver takes one hand off of the steering wheel to hold food or beverage items or to transport such items to the vicinity of his mouth for the purpose of eating or drinking.
The first and most obvious way of reducing this time in which the driver has only one hand on the steering wheel is to provide adequate means for temporary storage of such food and beverage items in immediate proximity to the driver. It must be understood that the most common beverage item consumed by the driver whether simply commuting to work or driving across country is hot coffee. Even more so than other beverages consumed in the automobile, hot coffee presents a serious risk of burning the driver as well as damaging the interior of the vehicle if a spill were to occur. However, there are many beverages other than coffee that are contained in different types of cans, boxes, cups etc. which are consumed by people driving automobiles. Because of the basic instability of the vehicle as a support for any open beverage container, it is desirable to provide some means of holding the container upright if the driver is to be able to store the container temporarily without holding on to it. In the design of some of the more sophisticated automobiles the need for some sort of beverage container holder has been recognized, and there have been provided cup or container receiving wells located along the vehicle dash board or in the area between the driver's and the passenger's seats. These cup receiving wells are often not disposed immediately adjacent the driver and are often difficult to access particularly by a left handed person.
In addition to the cup receiving recesses, some vehicles are provided with shelves on the dash board or in the console between the front seats. These shelves may be used to store food items such as hamburgers, French fries and other typical "carry out" types of food as well as the plastic utensils that might be provided to eat such foods. In general these shelves are poorly positioned with respect to the driver so that his attention will be distracted from the road as he accesses these shelves for the food and related items stored thereon. In addition to the shelves and receptacle holders that are supplied as original equipment with some automobiles, there have been many types of shelves and receptacles sold through automotive parts stores and hardware stores for installation by the car owner in an attempt to solve the problem of temporarily storing beverage cups and fast food so that is conveniently accessible to the driver. None of these items has solved the problem of storing such food and beverage items in convenient proximity to the driver so as to minimize the distraction of the driver as he selects such food and beverage items and returns them to the temporary storage means.
The individual serving trays, that are designed for use around the home for buffet dining and the like as well as those designed for use at picnics and family outings, are not at all suitable for use in an automobile. The main problem involved in the use of such serving trays by the driver of an automobile relates to the difficulty of maintaining the lap tray in position while at the same time performing the driving function and having the automobile subjected to the normal forces as it stops, starts and passes through turns. Lap trays that were intended to be balanced on the legs of the user would not be suitable for a driver who should be concentrating on his driving and not on maintaining the position of a lap tray and its contents. Furthermore, the lack of adequate means to secure the food and beverage containers from sliding or shifting on the tray surface would also make them unsuitable for use in a moving vehicle.
Although the space between the steering wheel and the trunk or torso of the driver may be controlled by the positioning of the seat, the preferred position places the driver's torso about 6 to 10 inches away from the edge of the steering wheel. As a consequence, most individual serving trays would not comfortably fit in the space between the driver's torso and the steering wheel. This problem may be further aggravated by the fact that many drivers have a protruding stomach that lessens the space available between the steering wheel and the driver's torso to accommodate any sort of lap tray.
It would also be desirable for the lap tray to be sufficiently narrow so that it could be inserted into and removed from the driver's lap while he is seated behind the steering wheel. It would be inconvenient and possibly hazardous if the tray extended beneath the steering wheel and removal of the tray required the driver to move from his seat behind the wheel. There would also be a possible problem with the tray or its contents interfering with the rotation of the wheel if it extended beneath the wheel when in position in the drivers lap.
There are other prior art patents that relate generally to food and beverage serving trays which fail to solve the problem of securing the tray with respect to the user's lap. The Mackey U.S. Pat. No. 3,244,125 is directed to a food serving tray which is intended to rest on the seat of an automobile. The tray of the Mackey patent is not a lap tray, and it would be inconvenient and distracting for the driver to be required to turn to the side and reach across toward the middle of the seat to take from and return items to this tray. The British Patent Specification No. 1,121,150 discloses a lap tray which is adapted for supporting a book or writing materials as well for food and beverages. While the British patent discloses various embodiments of lap trays that have pockets for receiving food and beverage containers, no means are disclosed for securing the trays in place in the lap. The trays of the British patent provide a substantial angle between the food supporting surface and the leg engaging portions of the lap trays. Other patents on food and beverage serving trays designed for use in an automotive are the Brown U.S. Pat. No. Des. 186,368 and Roth U.S. Pat. No. Des. 293,163 neither of which would be suitable for use as a lap tray.
The U.S. Pat. No. 4,721,216 to Kinder is directed to a beverage container holder which is intended to be supported on the seat of a car between the legs of the user. The holder has an upwardly facing recess which is stepped downwardly in diameter in order that the holder would receive and support beverage receptacles of differing sizes and shapes. Other than this recess configuration, the Kinder patent has no relevance to the lap tray constituting our invention.